Huh, that's an interesting way to feel! I wish I remember what AIM felt like better; I was so young when I used it that any chance I had to IM people was exciting. I was probably an absolute pain in the ass.
D'you think this could be — at least in part — because Facebook is an always-on environment for a lot of people? They're not explicitly on to chat, so there's more of an unstated barrier to beginning a conversation.
Somebody got aggressive after being detained for hours on end and having their flight cancelled, at expense? Holy shit! Pack your bags, men: we found ourselves a terrorist.
And putting politics "in front of his art" will probably convince some of the, you know, thousands of people who read his blog posts on Hacker News and elsewhere, that maybe his books are worth picking up and buying.
The government is not a monolithic entity. The evils of intrusive surveillance doesn't make, say, social programs, or economic regulation, evil just because they're other large government programs. Libertarianism is great if you're already wealthy; it's... problematic... if you're starting off from a position of relatively little power.
> I prefer my sci-fi writers to be dedicated libertarians. So maybe, if you aren't, don't publicize it.
Marco's not attempting to communicate clearly in the sense of "push data down foobarbazqux's infohole." He's trying to communicate clearly in the sense of "grab foobar's attention, state his perspective provocatively, and attempt to not only reach an audience but make them think and talk."
Clearly he's succeeded, from the conversation going on in this post. Marco is occasionally pretty obnoxious, and his ideas are frequently not always well thought-out, but I like writers who attempt to be not only clear, but compelling.
Paul Graham has plenty of terrible essay names, and plenty of terrible essays at that. One of the things that frustrates me about him as a writer is that on occasion he attempts to strike an "objective" tone while offering a skewed and entirely subjective perspective. Besides, conveying pure abstract information should not be the point of an essay. Tone, emotion, purpose, and construction should all be deliberate. Otherwise you get Mashable—ultraspecific titles geared to ultraspecific articles which are so drained of anything beyond pure bullet-point content that you could train a machine to read and interpret it. It's such a waste.
It takes you two seconds to click on a link and look at it, ten seconds tops to decide if you're going to gain something by reading it. If you're clicking on so many links per day that twelve seconds here and there is putting a dent in your productivity/well-being, then there is a worse problem here than ambiguously-titled essays, and ironically, it's a problem that you'll start to solve by seeking more challenging pieces of writing to tackle to distract yourself from the constant useless information mill that the Internet so readily provides.
If you think that treating genders equally has nothing to do with accepting variations in social norms, then you're missing pretty much the whole purpose of the "treat women equally to men" thing.
Gender inequality is almost wholly a social problem, not a biological one. And
> It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent.
You know, I am a huge Apple fan, but I don't like this argument. It suggests there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS, when in fact both Android's and Windows's designs offer a number of features that iOS lacks. While I don't think either come within spitting distance of iOS's build quality, there are plenty of reasons to want to use them anyway.
Particularly since Apple is a company which hires plenty of programmers, I imagine there'd be plenty of users who want to use an open-source phone OS. Unless they're all jailbreaking their iPhones, which would be pretty amusing actually.
If you were really treating women equally to men, you wouldn't follow a "what's good for one is good for the other" policy. You'd accept that the norms and behaviors of each gender should be held in equal regard, and adapt your own behavior to the person or group of people you're talking with. Acknowledging, in other words, that women have as much right to be in the workplace as men, rather than treating their actions as somehow foreign or alien to the "acceptable" male norms.
I mean, your simple and straightforward logic is the logic that four-year-old boys use when they want to punch girls on the playground and don't feel like being courteous.
Some people are just huggers. As a fan of hugs I approve of people who get down to hugging quickly, though I understand why non-huggers would be squicked out by that.
If that wigs you out, I have a particular friend group for whom kissing becomes a thing almost immediately after they've met you. The first time it happens it can be absurdly disorienting.
What Twitter is awful at – awful – is ensuring you see content from people who don't update frequently. RSS is valuable not for following content gluttons like Hacker News, but for following blogs by people who update only once every three months, or even more rarely.
News gluttonry never needed RSS anyway – generally you only need one source of neverending news as-is. RSS is for more selective reading, and its advantage lies in how it gives equal weight to people who don't publish often as it gives to people who post 50 new entries a day.
There are plenty of advantages to relative sizing, and in general it's a good policy, but there are many excellently-designed web sites whose sizes are absolute – just as there are many shit designs that're responsive as hell.
Well said. I'm in that uncomfortable place right now where doing what I love doing makes me no money, and is months (at least) from making me money, and it is hard to get myself into the mindset where I'm trying to ask people to give me pay for what I can do – which is hard, because I don't want to do it and I worry that I'm bad at pretending. Or else the jobs market is just fiercely competitive nowadays. Probably both at once.
Here's hoping there's a light somewhere down that tunnel... it's soothing to know that Watterson went down a similar one, and fought a fierce fight to get to the end of it himself.
You're reading too much into his retirement. He gives a perfectly good explanation why he quit within the speech:
Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.
Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.
To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.
As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.
On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.
It's strange to hear an argument for not selling out in an age where plenty of artists, even some of the most talented ones, have shrugged and accepted that being a sell-out is the quickest way to go about making money for doing what you love. I wonder if Watterson was simply old-fashioned, or if he noticed something that nowadays we're less capable of noticing.
Ultimately, Steve Jobs had an insight into what computers could be, how technology could work, that was not only powerful but that Apple worked to execute throughout the entire stack of its product. From industrial design to operating system to software, his vision infused Apple's products in a way that very few other computer manufacturers have seen. Even now, as "well-designed products" are becoming a popular thing – due, in no small part, to Apple's influence – it is difficult to find products that are as thoroughly, nit-pickingly well-thought-out as Apple's stuff.
Back when nobody had much of a reason to believe in Steve Jobs and his vision, his tyrannical style was what got teams working outrageous hours, sacrificing personal lives, and shipping products that all sane people were convinced couldn't be done. So at a key moment in Apple's history, he provided a push that brought the company great success.
Very few people have that sort of all-pervasive vision; most of the people who think they do are deluding themselves. Most of the time you don't need an asshole on top driving things. Heck, it's possible that even Steve didn't have to be an asshole, that his dickish personality was just a shortcut he used to get things done conveniently.
Plenty of brilliant people have unpleasant or antisocial personalities. Sometimes it's because that's what it takes to make people who don't share your vision do what they're told. Sometimes it's because brilliant people are human too, and as flawed as any of us. Usually it's somewhere in between.
You assert that text books are no different from novels? That's absurd.
(If your assertion is that text books are, in fact, art, then I agree with you. But they're a very different sort of art from the sort that _why was creating – starting from the fact that the Poignant Guide is a work of fiction, and most textbooks are not.)
I'm not a programmer. I'm barely even a member of this community. You're far more involved in this world than I am; you know names and see projects that never cross my path. My understanding of your world is shallow. I wouldn't blame that on the community, actually; that's all my fault. :-)
Let me argue from a different, slightly better-thought-out angle. It's not that no programmers do artistic things. Indeed, there are fascinating people using code pretty much everywhere, and there have been for decades. What made _why unique was that many of his projects were aimed at introducing new people to programming, in a plethora of different ways which felt more organic and intimate than your average "learn to code" resource. Codecademy, which enjoyed a tremendous success over the last year, struck me as a slightly less whimsical version of _why's TryRuby, which always struck me as particularly ingenious.
Plenty of interesting programmers don't concern themselves much with reading out to amateurs, whereas _why had the (Poignant) Guide and TryRuby and Shoes. And _why wrote, not just about the code itself, but about the culture; some of the most interesting parts of the (Poignant) Guide concerned not the Ruby language, but the Ruby culture, which he made out to be particularly enthusiastic and welcoming. (While he was a member of the community, he did a fantastic job of encouraging young idiots like myself; I received an email from him 5 years ago while I hated my environment and what I was doing and it helped me out tremendously.)
It seemed, and still seems now, like he was making an incredible effort to reach out to a sort of person that normally was turned off by the way programming worked, and convince them to give programming a try anyway. At the same time, the things he said which were critical about the community rang true with those of us who didn't feel like proper parts of it – I, as I've already admitted, am not really a programmer and my approaches to building things tend to run contrary to how most programmers work. Yet with him, and with people who were especially inspired by his work, my way of doing things has felt like a valid and worthwhile approach to making things, and I've been able to feel like a bit more part of a community because of it.
I wish there were more people like _why doing that. The programming world still feels like a cold and forbidding place to those of us who aren't already within it. It's a shame that it feels that way. I don't think that it has to be.
It would. I wasn't expecting this thread to turn as heated as it abruptly became, or I'd have thought my words out more carefully. Forgive my sloppiness?
D'you think this could be — at least in part — because Facebook is an always-on environment for a lot of people? They're not explicitly on to chat, so there's more of an unstated barrier to beginning a conversation.